AMD recently demonstrated the industry’s first native quad-core x86
server and workstation processor, achieving four x86 processing cores
on a single die of silicon. As the next innovation on AMD’s consistent
roadmap, native Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors continue AMD’s
tradition of helping to reduce the total cost of ownership for the
enterprise.The native quad-core AMD processors are designed to allow
current DDR2-based AMD Opteron processor platforms to be seamlessly
upgraded with just a BIOS update, providing performance enhancements
due to our microarchitecture improvements and increased core count, yet
remain in the same thermal and power envelope.

As you know from previous e-mails, I’m totally an AMD fan. Ever since the Athlon came out in ’99, trumping the P-III, I’ve been cheering the underdog. Well, they’re the underdog again with the Xeon 5100 being such a strong performer — so a quad-core Opteron on a single die does sort of whup a–.